Monday, August 17, 2020

“False Story” Historiography

 
“Madam, don’t bring your sons up to detest the United States Government. Recollect that we form one country now. Abandon all these local animosities and make your sons Americans.”
-Lee writing to a Southern mother, with a heart wrenching of hatred towards the North. Source: Proceedings & Debates, 2nd Session of the Seventy-First Congress, United States of America, Vol. LXXII-Part 8, United States Government Printing Office, Washington: 1930, 8492. 
Since approximately 2013, a new historiography of the American Civil War/War Between the States, the False Story, has emerged and called into serious consideration the previously-widely ascribed ​’Lost Cause’.[1] This challenge to the Lost Cause thesis might be said to have helped urge the production of many high-quality works, ​such as Black American history.[2] It may further be held that all historiographies possess some form of limit to their accurate scope of reference, and ​that historical study is a constantly-shifting landscape viewed from the unique scope of each successive generation. Yet, the nascent school ​has itself already revealed a number of questionable methodological practices, such as in the works of Adam Serwer and Eric Foner.

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